[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 10]
[Senate]
[Pages 13349-13350]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                               ESTATE TAX

  Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, each and every day it gets harder and 
harder to listen to my Republican friends who race to the Senate floor 
breathlessly telling the American people how concerned they are about 
the $13 trillion national debt and how we have got to get our financial 
house in order. They are just very, very upset about that.
  But, as you know, under the leadership of President George W. Bush, 
these same Republicans turned a record-breaking Federal surplus left by 
the Clinton administration into record-breaking deficits.
  Back then, their rallying cry was ``deficits don't matter,'' 
articulated by then-Vice President Dick Cheney. This ``deficits don't 
matter'' philosophy gave us two wars that were not paid for. There are 
estimates that the war in Iraq alone will end up costing some $3 
trillion, unpaid for. They gave us some $700 billion in tax breaks that 
went to the wealthiest 1 percent. They gave us a $400 billion unpaid 
for prescription drug program written by the insurance and drug 
companies. They gave us a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street.
  But under President Obama, Republicans have seemingly taken a 180-
degree turn. Apparently, deficits do matter. Now they say we can't 
afford to extend unemployment insurance to 2 million Americans who lost 
their jobs during the worst recession in modern history, and they say 
we just don't have the money to create millions of new jobs by 
investing in rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and transforming 
our energy system. We just don't have the money to do that.
  The Republican hypocrisy is now about to advance to a whole new 
level. In the name of fiscal responsibility, they are opposing 
virtually every effort to help the middle-class and working families. 
We just can't afford to do it. But when it comes to the needs of 
millionaire and billionaire families, our Republican friends have no 
problem reducing revenue by hundreds and hundreds of billions of 
dollars. In other words, they are deficit hawks when it comes to the 
needs of ordinary people, but they are very big spenders when it comes 
to the needs of the rich.
  Four years ago, every Republican but two voted to completely 
eliminate the estate tax, a tax that has been in existence since 1916, 
and impacts only the very wealthiest families, the top three-tenths of 
1 percent. Under the estate tax, 99.7 percent of American families do 
not pay one nickel. This huge tax break for the wealthy, repealing the 
estate tax, which Republicans are fighting to do, would increase the 
national debt by more than $1 trillion over a 10-year period. These 
deficit hawks, who are so concerned about the national debt and record-
breaking deficits, want to increase the national debt by over $1 
trillion in a 10-year period.
  Let me tell my colleagues who the major beneficiaries of this tax 
break would be. Would it be the average middle-class worker who during 
the Bush years saw a $2,200 decline in his income? We have a collapsing 
middle class, working people desperately in need. Would Republican 
repeal of the estate tax help those workers? Not a chance. Nobody in 
the middle class would get one nickel of a tax break.
  Would Republican repeal of the estate tax help a single mother 
struggling to send her daughter to college, maybe for the first time 
ever in that family's history? College costs are going up. Working 
people can't afford college. Would it help that single mom? No, I am 
afraid not. That single mom would not get one penny.
  Would it help one of the millions of senior citizens struggling to 
maintain their dignity on Social Security benefits? This year there is 
no COLA for senior citizens. I tried to get some help there. 
Republicans voted against it. Couldn't do it. Would it help senior 
citizens struggling with the high cost of medicine? No. Those senior 
citizens would not get one penny of help by Republican repeal of the 
estate tax.
  I must be honest. Sadly, there are also a few Democrats who are 
supporting this giveaway, all Republicans and a few Democrats.
  Who are the major beneficiaries of the repeal of the estate tax or, 
as Republican pollsters like to call it, ``the death tax''? If we 
completely eliminated the estate tax, it would provide an estimated $32 
billion tax break for the Walton family, the founders of Walmart. We 
have a family whose fortune today is worth an estimated $86.8 billion. 
If, as the Republicans want, we eliminate the estate tax completely, 
this family--obviously of desperate need, obviously struggling hard to 
keep their family above water economically, struggling hard to stay off 
welfare--would receive an estimated $32.7 billion in tax breaks, if the 
estate tax is completely eliminated.
  Let's be clear. This policy being pursued by Republicans is designed 
to help the very richest people in our society.
  Interestingly enough, our Republican friends today in all likelihood 
are going to vote against providing a $35 billion emergency extension 
of unemployment benefits that will help 2 million Americans who have 
lost their jobs through no fault of their own. We can't afford to do 
it. We just don't have the money. But apparently we do have the money 
to provide almost $33 billion to a family worth $86 billion, one of the 
richest families in the world.
  It is not only the Walton family our Republican friends and a few 
Democrats want to help. Permanently repealing the estate tax will also 
provide an $11 billion tax break to the Mars candy bar family. We all 
eat Mars candy bars. They are going to get an $11 billion tax break.
  It would provide a $9 billion tax break to the Cox Cable family and a 
$2.5 billion tax break to the family who founded Campbell Soup. No one 
in the bottom 99.7 percent of the population, nobody in the working 
class, nobody in the middle class, no low-income person, nobody even in 
the upper middle class will gain one cent of benefit from these tax 
breaks.
  Today, while Republicans may not have the votes to permanently 
eliminate the estate tax, they are working feverishly to push 
legislation to substantially lower that tax. In fact, they have already 
succeeded in eliminating the estate tax this year, and this year alone, 
as result of President Bush's $1.35 trillion 2001 tax cut legislation. 
Wiping out this tax in 2010, when billionaires are dying, for the first 
time in 95 years their families will not pay one cent in taxes. That 
has already cost our Treasury, in the midst of a $13 trillion national 
debt, billions and billions of dollars in needed revenue.
  It seems to me that at a time when this country has a $13 trillion 
national debt, at a time when 22 percent of our children are living in 
poverty--the highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialized 
world--at a time when our infrastructure is crumbling, at a time when 
we have a desperate

[[Page 13350]]

need to transform our energy system and by doing that we can put 
millions of people to work rebuilding America, transportation 
infrastructure, energy, it is beyond comprehension, literally beyond 
comprehension that anyone can come down to the floor of this Senate and 
argue with a straight face that we should provide hundreds of billions 
of dollars in tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires.
  I should add all of this takes place within the context of the United 
States already having by far the most unequal distribution of wealth of 
any major country on Earth. The top 1 percent own more wealth than the 
bottom 90 percent. When we give away billions more in tax breaks to the 
very rich, we are only exacerbating that. We are making that wealth gap 
even greater.
  That is why I have introduced the Responsible Estate Tax Act, S. 
3533, along with Senators Harkin, Whitehouse, Sherrod Brown, and 
Senator Franken. This legislation would raise $318 billion over the 
next decade by establishing a graduated inheritance tax on estates of 
over $3.5 million. I actually cannot take credit for this legislation. 
I would like to, but I cannot. It would be dishonest. This is an idea 
developed 100 years ago by a good Republican President named Teddy 
Roosevelt.
  In 1910 he pushed this idea which eventually became adopted in 1916. 
This is what Teddy Roosevelt, as this chart indicates, said 100 years 
ago. I think my Republican friends probably will not be quoting Teddy 
Roosevelt, though he is one of our great Presidents. This is what Teddy 
Roosevelt said:

       The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, 
     restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a 
     small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful 
     men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power.

  That sounds pretty familiar. A small group of incredibly wealthy 
people whose sole objective is to hold and increase their power.

       Therefore, I, [Teddy Roosevelt] believe in . . . a 
     graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly 
     safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount 
     with the size of the estate.

  What he was talking about was not from a financial point of view of 
bringing in revenue. He was expressing fear about America becoming an 
oligarchic aristocracy in which a few people had incredible wealth and 
used that wealth to perpetuate their position in society. If that is 
not what is happening today, then I don't know what is happening.
  When we look at Wall Street spending $300 million trying to stop any 
real reform of Wall Street at a time when these guys are making all 
kinds of money, having been bailed out by taxpayers, if we look at the 
oil companies and all of their lobbyists around here, that is precisely 
what is going on. A small number of incredibly wealthy people are 
perpetuating their power through their wealth.
  In order to gain support for the permanent repeal of the estate tax 
or a major reduction in estate tax rates, Republicans and lobbyists 
representing the super rich are doing what they do best, and that is 
distorting reality. We will not hear any of my Republican friends who 
talk about repealing the estate tax tell us that the richest families 
in America are going to be receiving $10, $20, $30 billion in tax 
breaks. What they have done, both as politicians and through their 
lobbyists, has created a mythology that a responsible and a fair estate 
tax--or as their pollsters have framed it, ``a death tax''--will 
somehow destroy family farms and small businesses.
  In other words, what they are doing is what they very often do. They 
say: It is not the very rich, the billionaires we are interested in 
protecting. It is not the Walmart people. We are interested in family 
farmers and small businesses. Those are the people we are trying to 
protect. But nothing could be further from the truth.
  As usual, they are using their old tactic of pretending to worry 
about the needs of ordinary people as a smokescreen to serve extremely 
wealthy special interests.
  Let's talk a little bit about what they are saying. In terms of the 
preservation of the family farm, something I happen to believe in 
passionately--we have a lot of family farms in Vermont--the American 
Farm Bureau was asked some years ago to come up with a single example 
of one family farm being lost as a result of the estate tax. They could 
not find one farm, not one farm that had to be sold as a result of the 
estate tax, not one.
  I should tell you, the legislation I have authored provides even more 
protections to family farms than previous law. So they are not 
protecting the family farmers; they are protecting the Walton family 
and other billionaire families.
  In terms of small businesses--something that is obviously vital to 
our economy; small business is the engine of job creation; we have to 
protect small businesses--this is what the nonpartisan Tax Policy 
Center has estimated: that only 80 small businesses and farm estates 
throughout the country paid an estate tax in 2009--80; 8-0--
representing, as this chart shows, 0.003 percent of all estates. In 
other words, virtually every single small business and family farm in 
this country would not pay one penny in estate taxes under my bill, and 
because of protections in the Tax Code, their effective, real tax rate 
would only be 14 percent. And the relatively few people who inherit 
small businesses who pay an estate tax are given 14 years to pay it 
off. They do not have to pay it off in 1 year.
  So when our Republican friends come down here and tell us they are 
fighting to protect the family farm or small businesses, that just is 
not the case. What they are coming down here to do is to protect the 
Walton family and the Steinbrenner family and the other billionaire 
families who are spending a whole lot of money in a major lobbying 
effort to make sure the richest people in this country become even 
richer.
  So I think what this debate is really all about is what the old Woody 
Guthrie song framed and described as ``which side are you on?''--which 
side are you on?--and the Republicans have answered very loudly and 
clearly, when it comes to the needs of the unemployed and the 
uninsured, when it comes to protecting the interests of the struggling 
middle class, they are just not there. When it comes to ordinary 
people, the Republicans are deficit hawks. But if you are a millionaire 
or a billionaire family and if you need a huge tax break that will cost 
our government hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars, you can 
count on Republicans for your support. That is what this issue is 
about.
  With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Montana is recognized.

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